Microsoft gives us a taste of Windows Phone “Mango”

Microsoft has officially revealed many—but not all—of the features coming to …

After showing off many of the developer features at April's MIX event, today Microsoft for the first time showed off what the next version of Windows Phone, codenamed "Mango," will offer the platform's users. Or at least, some of what it would offer; with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer boasting of "500 new features" in the new operating system, there apparently wasn't time to show off everything that would be coming to Microsoft's phone platform.

Communications

Unified messaging

Today, Microsoft's focus was on three main areas: communication, applications, and Web connectivity. Confirming previous leaks, the company showed off unified messaging—the phone can seamlessly switch between SMS, Live Messenger, and Facebook chat. As announced last week, threaded e-mail is found in the new operating system, as is a unified inbox facility. This allows selective unification of inboxes; for example, you can unify your personal Hotmail and Gmail accounts while leaving your work inbox separate.

Also as leaked, contacts will be groupable, with options for group messaging. Each group is shown using live tiles similar to those found on the phone's home screen, affording at-a-glance access to everything that's going on within a group.

Contact groups

The presence of visual voicemail was confirmed, though not demonstrated.

Communication today makes use of more than just phones and e-mail; social networking is essential for many users. Windows Phone already has deep integration with Facebook. Mango extends this integration to include Twitter, as previously announced, and LinkedIn status updates. New face recognition capabilities allow easy tagging of Facebook friends.

Speech-to-text support was confirmed, extending the existing voice control to include support for message dictation. Not previously known, but shown today, was support for text-to-speech; receive a text message while using a hands-free kit in your car, and you can tell the phone to read you the text message, so you never have to take your eyes off the road.

Applications

On the application front, Microsoft essentially reiterated the features shown at MIX. Mango includes limited multitasking support; background applications are suspended (though as disclosed at the developer event, there will be some provision to perform simple tasks in the background), and holding down the back button shows a slide deck of running applications allowing easy switching between them. Live tiles, the rich, dynamic squares of information found on the phone's main screen, will be easier for developers to create, thanks to the aforementioned limited background processing facility, and tiles will be able to deep link inside applications.

The Xbox hub has been substantially reworked, improving its social credentials—for example, you can compare your gamer score with people on your friend list—improving access to installed games, and incorporating the richly animated 3D avatars previously found in the Xbox Live Extras application.

Web

Mango's Web browser is a big leap forward: Microsoft claimed that the browser is not just similar to its Internet Explorer 9 desktop browser, but is in fact the same browser—and as such, boasts both the decent standards support and excellent performance of the desktop browser. The company showed a side-by-side demonstration of the Mango beta, and the latest shipping versions of iOS, Android, and BlackBerry OS when running one of the company's own benchmark applications. Windows Phone was substantially faster than the competition—though whether it retains that performance lead once it actually ships is an open question.

Mango's browser won't support Flash, either.

It was with the Bing application that the company showed the most new, not previously leaked, information. The new Bing application includes two major new features; "Local Scout," and "Quick Cards." Local Scout extends traditional location-based search to include extensive suggestions and information about the current area; for example, it'll tell you about the local farmers' market, tourist attractions, and which restaurants are hot, with the goal being to give Windows Phone users all the insight that a local would have.

Local scout

Bing's maps have been extended to include interior maps; Bing maps won't just guide you to the shopping mall, they'll show you where to go within the mall.

Quick Cards extend the current application's smart, structured results for certain search types. Search for a movie and the phone will tell you where and when you can see it, what it scored in the reviews, who's in it, and more. Search for a venue, and it'll show you all the upcoming events, how to get there, and so on. As shown at MIX, applications will also be able to get in on the action too; the movie search will also let you jump straight into the relevant part of the IMDB application too.

Bing has new icons for Bing Vision, Bing Audio, and Bing Voice, though only Bing Vision was described today

Again confirming rumors, Bing has gained vision, allowing scanning of barcodes, QR codes, and OCR. A demonstration of the feature showed a book's front cover being scanned; after the book was identified, a link from Bing to the Kindle application allowed instant switching into the book's Kindle application page, from where it could then be purchased.

Broader reach

To enable Mango to reach more markets, Microsoft has confirmed that it will include richer language support. For this first time, the platform will include support for complex non-Latin scripts; Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean will all be supported. The company also announced that new hardware vendors would be supporting the platform: Nokia (of course), Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE will all launch Mango devices, and existing manufacturers Samsung, HTC, and LG would also have new hardware for Mango. Oddly, Dell, which currently makes the Venue Pro, was not listed either as a current or future manufacturer.

Though plenty of new features were shown off, the mood of the event was a little peculiar. Almost everything shown today had either been leaked or shown by Microsoft at previous events. Some leaked features are still yet to be confirmed—including the tantalizing hint of turn-by-turn navigation—but the confirmation of so much that had leaked already lends credence to the as-yet unconfirmed rumors. Instead, the company said that more would be shown off in coming months. Though Microsoft said that it had Nokia devices running Mango in its labs, there was no hardware to play with, whether from Nokia or anyone else.

The company confirmed that Mango would be available to current Windows Phone users, but gave no indication of a release date, other than "fall"—meaning that Mango is still many months away. A throwaway comment was made that there would be greater opportunities for hardware vendors to differentiate their products, but the only differentiating feature described was optional 4G support. Early in Windows Phone's life there was a promise of a cheaper hardware specification with a lower screen resolution; this has fallen by the wayside, but the talk of greater hardware differentiation again raises the specter of new hardware form factors.

The company also wouldn't indicate if the new language support would spill over into new regional support. The experience of using Windows Phone varies greatly from country to country, with some features like speech-to-text currently only available in the US; Bing's local search is similarly inconsistent, with local results in US and UK, for example, but not in New Zealand. Given the desire to give the platform greater global reach, this is clearly something that needs to be remedied—but the company had no comment to make on the matter.

The extent of enterprise policy support also remains unknown.

Mango continues to look like a strong release, one that brings much-needed features and a raft of unique innovations. So far, Windows Phone has failed to ignite consumer interest. Mango certainly has the goods—will Microsoft be able to get it out soon enough to matter?